Well, Chocolate truffles to be exact, so not the real deal at all. However with the oncoming (like a freight train!) Christmas season, I’m very tempted to have a go at these – especially since it looks like a good recipe to have your children help out on.

Wow! This is a great step forwards in the opening up of the process! I have long said that it is very difficult for the average person to really have any idea at all of who they are voting for and what the candidates represent. A tool like this would really help to point you in the right direction come election time.

Using thermionic energy conversion Eneco are working on a solid-state (no moving parts) chip that can convert (waste) heat into electricity at efficiencies between 20 and 30 percent. That is pretty impressive.

Today the kids and I built our first solar oven, inspired by the good peoples at solarcooking.org and their (many many) plans for solar cookers. In particular we made an attempt at The “Minimum” Solar Box Cooker.

By the time it was made we had a little over two hours of sun left in the day, so no cooking was going to happen. In testing, however, the oven did quickly get to 48 degrees celcius – sometime between ten and fifteen minutes. I hold high hopes that tomorrow we’ll be able to do a test run of biscuits, perhaps even some photos.

My wife showed me this one – up in the sunshine state a climate change aware individual has done a complete electric conversion of a production car. Runs fast enough to get booked for speeding and at similar cost to running on petrol when taking battery costs into account.